In March 2020, after a series of rockfall accidents, and with international coal prices plunging, Kameron Collieries announced that it was permanently closing its mine at Donkin on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. One hundred and forty workers received layoff notices just as pandemic-induced closures swept through the rest of the Canadian economy.

Cape Breton is a coal-mining region that has been hammered by decades of deindustrialization, with devastating social consequences. The mine opened in 2017, spurring hopes for economic recovery in the region, only to be shuttered three years later.

The Donkin mine closure, and the wider history of coal extraction in Nova Scotia, can help us understand how energy transitions ought to be managed in the future. Canada has historically dealt with decline in the energy sector by propping up loss-making, polluting industries that later abandon their workers. The Canadian government’s intervention in Nova Scotia’s fossil-fuel industry was a failed thirty-year experiment, and a sad lesson in the unrealized possibilities of publicly managed energy transitions.